The relentless increase in Internet usage and e-commerce as well as the proliferation of networked digital computing devices has driven the demand for not only large capacity data storage but also high data availability and sophisticated data management, such as storage virtualization. To meet these needs, many vendors offer networked attached storage (NAS) devices, storage array network (SAN) devices and sophisticated servers that have directly attached arrays of mass storage. These solutions can provide users with managed access to their data directly from their computing device or through a network and with high data availability. These solutions are not without challenges, however.
One challenge includes reducing latency in memory read transactions. For example, in enterprise database applications or in on-line transaction processing, massive amounts of data may need to be sorted or filtered. This requires that these applications have access to storage devices that can not only provide large data capacity but perform low latency memory read transactions for data stored randomly in the storage devices. Another example includes on-demand video applications. These applications must have access to storage devices that can retrieve large amounts of sequential data, such as video, with low latency and in multiple streams in order to maximize viewing enjoyment of the video in real-time by multiple end-users.
Yet another example requiring reduced latency in memory read transactions includes a storage virtualization application that can aggregate a pool of storage that can be used by requesting hosts. This pool of storage may include a set of storage devices that may be interconnected through a LAN, WAN or both, and that may use mass storage devices that have relatively high memory transaction read latency, such as hard disk drives (HDD), or that are coupled to a network with a relatively low network bandwidth.
Consequently, a need exists for a storage device that can provide low latency memory read transactions in a variety of applications.